09-25-21 Saturday Mt. Rushmore Trip Day 25 Viña Castellano Estate Winery, Auburn CA

- September 27, 2021

09-25-21

Vina Castellano Estate Winery,

Auburn CA

Harvest Host

Jeeps in Campground: 5 from the wedding

Drive Time: 2 1/2 Hours

Miles: 161

Barry got up early this morning and helped Glen feed the alpacas. He got me up after and I dressed and went out to the corrals. Glen haltered one of the alpacas and I walked up and down one of the corrals with her. Glen likes to let people do this because this way the alpacas get use to being haltered. It prepares them for shows. The other Harvest Host couple also walked a couple of them.

Carolyn in the turquoise shirt

Glen loving what he does

Glen showed us the different categories the animals are judged

for at a show: the crimping of their fleece, quality of fleece, body conformation, brightness of fleece and a whole bunch of other items. Just like dog shows. Sounds so complicated to me. When you split the fleece down to the skin you can see how much crimping of the fleece is different on each breed. This is also where you can see the brightness of the fleece color. The fleece on different areas of the body are used differently. The top quality fleece is around the middle.

He keeps the males and females in different corrals, except the crias, so that nature does not take its course. He doesn't want his heard to get out of control. One of the white males is the alpha male and he gets really excited when the girls get close. See the picture on the left. He's standing up on his hind legs. He's a very handsome male.

One thing I found fascinating is alpacas don't have top teeth. They have a hard pallet. You can see it in the picture to the left. They crush or mash their food. Their diet consists of alfalfa, oats and beet pulp. The beet pulp is high in nutrients. Glen feeds them in the morning and evenings. They have alfalfa all day to much on.

As you can see from this post and my last, we learned a lot about alpacas. They are very cool animals.

Our time at Sawdust came to an end and we had to get on the road.

We headed toward California and over Donner Pass, highest climb was 7,239. Crazy climb for this 20 year old lady but she did it. This time the air quality was much better. The sky was blue instead of filled with smoke. I felt sort of sad knowing once we entered California we would be home in a few days.

It was only 161 miles from Fallon to Auburn and about a 2 1/2 hour drive. We made it to Viña Castellano. We found Tina (the owner) and she pointed us to the area we would be for the night. The two normal Harvest Host spots were taken but we knew that. Plus a wedding was going on. We would move into one of the grassy HH spots tomorrow.

The wedding was to take place a few weeks ago but because of the fires it was postponed. Because of this she forgot to call us but found room for us. It was OK. After parking and getting settled we headed over to "The Cave" for tasting. It's a man made cave built into the side of a hill. It was a great place to taste. They only have one white and I didn't like it much. But I did like there Rosé and Barry liked the Tempranillo. We bought a bottle of each.

We got a dinner recommendation from Steve at the wine bar, and headed into Old Town Auburn for dinner. We found the restaurant, The Station House, with no problem and found parking. It was a busy place. We placed our order and sat down with our drinks. Our food came and it was delicious, a huge pretzel, caesar salad and brat corn dogs. The band playing was great and people were dancing and having a good time. I hardly remember crawling in bed.

Good night all!